Hidden History -- In The Making

THE KILLING OF PALESTINIAN JOURNALIST ANAS AL-SHARIF WAS PRAISED BY ISRAELI MEDIA

Media Freedom Groups Internationally Express Outrage At Targeting Of Journalists In Gaza. You Should Do The Same If You Want To Know The Truth And Escape Indoctrination.

“It’s about time,” wrote Daphna Liel, a senior journalist at Israel’s Channel 12 News, on her Telegram page on Sunday night.

“The IDF killed the terrorist who operated under the guise of an Al Jazeera journalist,” her report said, referring to the Israeli army.

The picture of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was attached.

The killing of Sharif on Sunday has provoked outrage from press freedom groups and other media outlets – but in Israel, the response by most of the media has seemingly been that Sharif, in fact, had it coming.

Ynet described Sharif as “the reporter-terrorist who was assassinated”, Maariv newspaper said he was “a journalist in the service of Hamas”, and Israel Hayom wrote that he was “a terrorist disguised as a journalist”.

On Sunday night, the Israeli military announced that it had attacked a journalists’ tent near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Sharif, who was one of the most prominent journalists covering Israel’s assault on Gaza, was the target of the attack.

In addition to Sharif, six other Palestinians were killed in the attack, including Al Jazeera correspondent and Middle East Eye contributor Mohammed Qreiqeh as well as camera operators Mohammed Noufal, Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa.

“The Israeli media’s response to the killing of the journalists was frightening,” Zahra Saeed, a Palestinian journalist at Radio Al-Shams, said.

“Amit Segal [a senior journalist at Channel 12 News] wrote on his Telegram account that he was waiting for this assassination, it’s unbelievable. He is part of the Israeli apparatus of incitement against journalists.”

“MURDER. PLAIN AND SIMPLE”

The Israeli attack on Sunday was condemned around the world. Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said: “Israel wiped out an entire news crew. It has made no claims that any of the other journalists were terrorists. That’s murder. Plain and simple.”

The war in Gaza is the deadliest conflict for journalists since such data began to be collected. Since the beginning of the war, Israel has killed 270 journalists and media workers.

The Israeli army spokesperson claimed it had documents indicating that Sharif was active in Hamas, but did not produce the evidence.

‘The Israeli media plays a central role in the genocide in Gaza, whether actively or silently’

– Hanin Majadli, Haaretz

Hanin Majadli, a Palestinian journalist who writes for Haaretz, said that Israeli media were actively trying to misrepresent the current situation as normal.

“The Israeli media is an inseparable part of the Israeli apparatus, which also includes the government, the military, and the public, which commits crimes in Gaza,” Majadli said.

“The Israeli media plays a central role in the genocide in Gaza, whether actively or silently.”

Right-wing journalist Yinon Magal of Channel 14 criticised a demonstration by Palestinians in Umm al-Fahm, in northern Israel, “for the ‘journalist’-terrorist, Anas al-Sharif”.

Saeed said there was effectively no difference between the mainstream media and the far-right media regarding the coverage of the assassination of Sharif.

“Anyone who asks questions and casts doubts finds himself under attack and outside the national consensus. He is labelled a traitor,” she said.

“The Israeli crimes in Gaza are justified in the mainstream media, just as they are in the extreme right media outlets,” Majadli said.

“There is no justification for the assassination of Anas al-Sharif. According to Israeli logic, Israeli journalists are also legitimate targets.”

Saaed added that “while an Israeli journalist called for the killing of 100,000 Gazans and another blew up houses in Lebanon, they are considered professional journalists.”

‘HUNT DOWN ARABS’

Journalists in Israel that condemned the attack faced criticism of their own. Majadli and Saeed said they received abuse while expressing their views on the assassination of Sharif.

Saeed said that a post on her Instagram account lamenting the killing of Sharif was translated into Hebrew and led to incitement.

According to Saeed, the purpose of translating the post was to “hunt down Arabs”, adding that this is what happens “when a Palestinian journalist in Israel wants to express her opinion”.

“All of our journalistic work has been reduced to whether you are for or against terrorism. Asking questions beyond the borders of the IDF spokesperson is considered a crime,” Saeed said, adding that “it is dangerous to be a journalist in Israel as well, not only in Gaza”.

“In Israel, the equation is very simple – the Palestinians are terrorists,” Majadli said. “A Palestinian journalist who speaks out against the killing of Anas al-Sharif is considered an encourager of terrorism, a sympathiser of terrorism, or an inciter to terrorism.

“There is no journalistic space in Israel. The vast majority of Palestinians in Israel can’t even say about Anas al-Sharif ‘may Allah have mercy on him’.”

“The incitement against Palestinian journalists is open, it is the norm, it is urgent,” Majadli said. “The incitement is here to stay for a long time. In Israel, the Palestinians need to know that they have to keep their mouths shut.”

THE FIRST STEP TOWARD A HEALTHY WORLD IS STOPPING THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA

Palestine Is The Moral Issue Of Our Time For The Just Like If You Saw Someone In Your Family Torturing Another Member Of Your Family To Death, Would Be The Same Thing To You.

Palestine is the moral question of our time because the abuse of the Palestinians is the most glaring, in-your-face symptom of the imperial disease. You can see the effects of so many of the empire’s abusive dynamics in how this thing is playing out, from racism to colonialism to militarism to war profiteering to mass media propaganda to empire-building to government corruption to suppression of free speech to ecocide to the heartless, mindless, soul-eating nature of the capitalist system under which we all live.

But there’s more to it than that. The primary reason to place Palestine front and center as the moral issue of our time is because if we can’t sort out the morality of an active genocide backed by our own western governments, we’re not going to be able to sort out anything else. Stopping the Gaza holocaust and bringing justice to the Palestinians is the very first step toward a healthy civilization.

Palestine is the moral issue of our time for the same reason if you saw someone in your family torturing another member of your family to death, it would be the most urgent matter happening in your life at that moment. You’d have other problems in your life, but that would come first.

If we’re the sort of society that would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of our own government and its allies, then we’re not the sort of society that can steer away from its trajectory toward dystopia and armageddon. If you’re the sort of individual who would allow a live-streamed genocide to take place with the support of your own government and its allies, then you’re not the sort of individual who can help steer our species away from disaster.

Gaza is not the only thing that matters in the world. But if you’re not forcefully opposing the Gaza holocaust, you definitely don’t have a healthy enough conscience to address any of the world’s other problems.

Some see Israel supporters refer to pro-Palestine sentiment as “virtue signaling”, which is funny because it means they view themselves as holding the unpopular, unvirtuous position. But really there’s nothing particularly virtuous about supporting Gaza, and it’s not some cool, special thing you’d want to signal about yourself. It’s just what you do when you’re not an extremely crappy person. It’s the basic, bare-minimum expectation of normal human morality.

You don’t want to follow any commentators or analysts who don’t speak out against the Gaza holocaust. At this point you shouldn’t even want to listen to any music or read any poetry from people who don’t take a stand against the Gaza holocaust.

The other day some Australian influencer forcefully tried to assert that it’s okay not to take a position on Gaza, and nobody in her replies was buying it. Supporting Israel and aligning with American foreign policy comes with a lot of career benefits for high-profile individuals, and you don’t get to both enjoy those perks and also keep ethical people interested in what you have to say. You can’t have it both ways. You have to choose between the perks and the people. You actually do.

Opposition to the Gaza holocaust is the very first step in assessing if someone is worth our time. If you can’t even get this basic, kindergarten-level moral question right, then your mind is too shallow and your heart too hardened for us to be interested in your analysis, your ideas, your politics, or your art.

There are so many terrible things in our world, and there is so much work that needs to be done to address them. We don’t know exactly what ideas, strategies and movements will get us out of this mess, but we do know that if any are going to emerge they’re going to come from the people who’ve been taking a strong stand against Israel and its western allies these last two years. Those are the individuals, movements, and political factions to pay attention to going forward. Nobody else is equipped to help.

THE AMERICAN REGIME SANCTIONED BRAZIL HEALTH OFFICIALS OVER CUBA’S OVERSEAS MEDICAL MISSIONS

Washington Claims The Health Officials Were Involved In Cuba’s ‘Coercive Labour Export’ Of Medical Workers. In Washington Providing Health Care Is A Crime?

The United States has announced it is revoking the visas of Brazilian, African and Caribbean officials over their ties to Cuba’s programme that sends doctors abroad, which Washington has described as “forced labour”.

The American regime named two Brazilian Ministry of Health officials, Mozart Julio Tabosa Sales and Alberto Kleiman, who have had their visas revoked for working on Brazil’s Mais Medicos, or “More Doctors” program, which was created in 2013.

In a statement on Wednesday, America’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio said sanctions were imposed on officials “involved in abetting the Cuban regime’s coercive labour export scheme”, which he claimed “enriches the corrupt Cuban regime and deprives the Cuban people of essential medical care”.

“The Department of State took steps to revoke visas and impose visa restrictions on several Brazilian government officials, former Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) officials, and their family members for their complicity with the Cuban regime’s labor export scheme in the Mais Medicos program,” Rubio said.

In an earlier statement, Rubio also announced visa restrictions for African officials, without specifying the countries involved, as well as the Caribbean country Grenada, for the same reasons.

The Cuban government has called Washington’s efforts to stop its medical missions a cynical excuse to go after its foreign currency earnings.

Cuba’s deputy director of American affairs, Johana Tablada, said its “medical cooperation will continue”.

“[Rubio’s] priorities speak volumes: financing Israel genocide on Palestine, torturing Cuba, going after health care services for those who need them most,” Tablada wrote on X.

Cuba’s international missions are sold to third countries and serve as a main source of foreign currency for the economically isolated nation, which has been subject to decades-long crippling sanctions by the American regime.

Havana’s international medical outreach goes back to the years following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, as Fidel Castro’s communist government provided a free or low-cost medical programme to developing nations as an act of international solidarity.

It is estimated that Havana has sent between 135,000 and 400,000 Cuban doctors abroad in total over the past five decades.

Brazilian Minister of Health Alexandre Padilha said his government would not bow to what he called “unreasonable attacks” on Mais Medicos.

Cuba’s contract in the program was terminated in 2018 after then-President-elect Jair Bolsonaro questioned the terms of the agreement and Cuban doctors’ qualifications.

Washington is already engaged in a heated diplomatic row with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government after imposing sanctions on Brazilian officials involved in Bolsonaro’s ongoing trial over his alleged coup plot in 2022.

Cuba’s healthcare system is public and meant to be universally accessible. But decades of sanctions and a downturn in tourism due to Trump’s travel ban mean the one-party state is no longer medically self-sufficient.

Since returning to the White House, the Trump administration has resumed its “maximum pressure” campaign against Cuba that typified his first term.

Last year, the island nation of 9.7 million people could not afford the $300m needed to import raw materials to produce hundreds of critical medicines.

In July, Trump imposed sanctions against Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Alvaro Lopez Miera, and Minister of the Interior Lazaro Alberto Alvarez Casas for their “role in the Cuban regime’s brutality toward the Cuban people”.

Earlier, the Trump administration also signalled its intention to tighten visa restrictions on Cuban and foreign officials linked to Havana’s medical missions around the globe.

Rubio described the medical program as one where “medical professionals are ‘rented’ by other countries at high prices”, but “most of the revenue is kept by the Cuban authorities”.

In 1999, after Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, Cuba sent medical staff and educators to the country. In return, Cuba bought Venezuelan oil at below-market prices, developing the idea of Havana exporting medical professionals as a source of revenue.

Some 30,000 Cuban medical workers were sent to Venezuela in the first 10 years of the “Oil for Doctors” programme.

Cuba later received hard currency to set up permanent medical missions in countries including South Africa, Brazil, Ecuador and Qatar.

DID YOU KNOW THAT WASHINGTON REALLY IS ISRAELI-OCCUPIED TERRITORY?

The American People Have Lost Control Of Their Government. During Netanyahu’s Address To A Joint Session Of Congress In July 2024, He Received Dozens Of Long And Loud Standing Ovations.

The enthusiastic response to his triumphalist speech brought to mind the joyous welcome given to a Roman general returning from a victorious campaign that brought glory to the Empire. Yet this was the leader of a small foreign country whose aggression brings it—and us—a cloud of shame.

Netanyahu, in the speech, boasted about the success of his nation’s campaign against Hamas. Of course, the Netanyahu regime has long indirectly supported Hamas, backing Qatar’s funding of the group. Hamas’s existence and continued rule over Gaza provides Israel a convenient excuse to divide, subjugate, and destroy the Palestinians instead of complying with any of the various “peace” deals it signed over the decades.

Netanyahu, by the time of his oration before American lawmakers, had spent the previous eight months mercilessly attacking Gaza with American-provided munitions. Israel was (and still is) bombing hospitals, churches, schools, water plants, and other civilian infrastructure, rendering most of Gaza uninhabitable. At the time, the mainstream narrative was repeating the “40,000 civilians killed” mantra. Mostly children, women, and other plainly innocent civilians—“collateral damage.” The real number may be even higher than the official count, with corpses buried under the rubble, and with civilians dying from lack of medicine and other basic needs.

As Netanyahu spoke, America’s congressional leaders enthusiastically applauded and cheered the perpetrator of this horror. Of course, July 2024 was the summer of an important election year, and they wanted to be seen demonstrating their fealty to the Israel lobby.

Questions remain about the Netanyahu government’s lack of preparation for the October 7^th terror attacks. Some, including concerned Jews in and out of Israel, have even questioned whether the Netanyahu government was truly caught off guard.

The vaunted Israeli military/intelligence network has recently demonstrated its ability to infiltrate the Iranian government to shut off the Iranian missile defense and also, from inside Iran, to assassinate many leading military, scientific, and government officials. Does anyone seriously believe Mossad was unable to infiltrate Hamas, a ragtag group of fighters who live a short distance from Tel Aviv and are supported, in part, with Israel’s cynical acquiescence? There are voices from inside Israel who have called out the Netanyahu government for “ignoring” intelligence and relaxing the security cordon designed to protect from such an attack.

The Hamas attack by light troops armed with small arms in no way indicates a strategic threat to Israel, but the brutality of the Israeli response is eroding support for Israel across the world, perhaps irreversibly.

Netanyahu has a history of seeing terror attacks as opportunities to exploit. When asked about the impact of 9/11 on American relations with Israel, according to the New York Times, Netanyahu said of the traumatic event, “It is very good.” He then added, “Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy,” meaning it will make Americans more sympathetic to Israelis. The Zionists had hoped for decades to use American military muscle to eliminate obstacles to the unfolding dream of a Greater Israel. (The First Gulf War had been insufficiently pursued by George H.W. Bush and was viewed as a missed opportunity.)

After 9/11, the American political/military/foreign policy establishment, driven by Zionist Christians and conservatives, proceeded to wreck Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon. Iran is a work in process. The other countries in the region have been bought off and/or subjugated in one way or another. Only the impecunious Houthis in tiny Yemen have somehow withstood the American-Israeli onslaught, though they have been degraded and their country wrecked.

Many of these actions and policies are mostly hidden from the American people under a veil of propaganda dutifully maintained by the legacy media and political class. The American people have been kept in the dark about what their elites do in their name and with their money. The truth is probably uglier than you think. In Washington, corruption “investigations” are usually theater and opaque for “national security” reasons.

After six decades, we recently learned that the so-called “lone gunman” who killed JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a CIA asset. How much of the really embarrassing information pertaining to that event ended up in burn bags, like the thousands of documents from the Russia collusion investigation, which were recently found in a secret room in the FBI Hoover Building? How many thousands of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and other controversies were stuffed into burn bags and incinerated?

We were already aware of small-scale destruction of sensitive materials, such as when President Bill Clinton’s national security aide, Sandy Berger, was caught removing and scissor-cutting copies of a classified document related to terror threats at the turn of the millennium. He received a slap on the wrist. Now, after the latest Russiagate revelation, unaccountable bureaucrats shoveling thousands of important documents into burn bags isn’t unthinkable. These concerns increase the gravity of the unreleased Epstein files and other significant documents which have been withheld.

Truly the American government does not act as the people wish it would. For the past century, Americans have voted over and over again to stop the forever wars, and every time a new president takes office he is confronted with some “emergency” requiring military action.

Last month the House of Representatives approved another $500 million dollars in aid for Israel’s military. Shortly after that, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) recessed the House early to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Johnson then led a large congressional delegation to Israel. Remember, he has to raise millions of dollars for the house elections next year.

Americans feel betrayed and demand to know whose interests their government serves. It is certainly not the American people’s.

PEACE IN UKRAINE SHOULD BE GIVEN A CHANCE BY DEMOCRATS

After Three And A Half Years Of Carnage In Ukraine, The Meeting Between President Trump And Russian President Vladimir Putin Was An Opportunity To Finally Find A Peaceful Solution To A Terrible War.

Genuine diplomacy to end the bloodshed is long overdue.

Up to 100,000 Ukrainians are estimated to have been killed, many of them civilians, along with more than twice that number of deaths among Russian troops. Hundreds of thousands more have been wounded on each side, and Russian bombardment has devastated many of Ukraine’s cities and towns.

Condemnations of the Trump-Putin summit are predictable from congressional Democrats more interested in scoring political points than opening a diplomatic door for peace. While most Republican leaders will praise Trump no matter what he does, pressure from the so-called national security establishment could damage prospects for a peaceful outcome in Ukraine.

Since early 2022, the American government, on a largely bipartisan basis, has provided upwards of $67 billion in military aid to Ukraine. Supporters of continuing the massive arming of Ukraine claim the highest moral ground, while others do the killing and dying. Even after it became clear that the war could go on indefinitely without any winner, the message from Washington’s elite politicians and pundits to the Ukrainian people has amounted to “let’s you and them fight.”

Last week, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) introduced a bill to give Ukraine $54.6 billion in aid over the next two years, with many billions going directly to arm the Ukrainian military. If the Trump-Putin summit is unsuccessful, the currently dim prospects for such legislation could brighten. This dynamic gives war enthusiasts and advocates for the military-industrial complex a motive to throw cold water on the summit.

While Murkowski now represents a minority view on Ukraine among fellow Republicans, Shaheen is decidedly in the mainstream of her Senate Democratic colleagues. Even after all the suffering and destruction in Ukraine, few seem really interested in giving peace a chance.

As for Trump, he has sometimes talked about seeking peace in Ukraine, even while greenlighting large quantities of weapons to the Kiev government. Given his mercurial approach, there is no telling what his mindset will be after meeting with Putin.

Most Democrats in Congress seem content with continuation of a war that has no end in sight. Little is being accomplished in military terms other than more killing, maiming and destruction.

During recent months, Ukrainian forces have lost ground to Russian troops. While some hawks still pretend that Ukraine could “win” the war with enough missiles, bombs, ammunition and other supplies from the America, realists scoff at such claims.

Unfortunately, while the war drags on, Democrats in Congress are prone to treat diplomacy as a third rail. To a large extent, their partisan template was reinforced nearly three years ago, making “diplomacy” a dirty word for the Ukraine war.

The fiasco began in late October 2022 with the release of a letter to President Biden signed by 30 House Democrats, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. The letter was judicious in its tone and content, affirming support for Ukraine and appropriately condemning “Russia’s war of aggression.” But the signatories got in instant hot water because the letter balanced its support for arming Ukraine with sensibly urging steps that could stop a war without a foreseeable end.

“Given the destruction created by this war for Ukraine and the world, as well as the risk of catastrophic escalation, we also believe it is in the interests of Ukraine, the United States, and the world to avoid a prolonged conflict,” the letter stated. “For this reason, we urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”

Just one day later, Jayapal issued a statement declaring that “the Congressional Progressive Caucus hereby withdraws its recent letter to the White House regarding Ukraine.” For some members of the caucus, the sudden withdrawal was a jarring and embarrassing retreat from a stance for diplomacy.

Ever since then, the war train has continued to roll, unimpeded by cooler heads. And, like elected officials in Washington, voters are looking at the war through partisan lenses.

A March Gallup poll found that 79 percent of Democrats said that the American regime was not doing enough to help Ukraine — a steep jump from 48 percent since the end of last year. During the same period, the number of surveyed Republicans with that view remained under 15 percent.

It is time for Americans and their elected representatives to set aside partisan lenses and see what’s really at stake with the Ukraine war. Endless killing is no solution at all.

Rebuilding détente between Washington and Moscow is essential — not only for the sake of Ukrainians and Russians who keep dying, but also for the entire world. The two nuclear superpowers must engage in dialogue and real diplomacy if the next generations all over the globe are to survive.

ARE AMERICAN CHRISTIANS BEING LOST BY ISRAEL?

Attacks On Christians In The Holy Land Have Sparked Backlash In America. An Israeli Tank Last Week Shelled The Only Catholic Church In Gaza, Killing Three And Gravely Wounding Several.

As Israel continues its assault on Gaza, enables settler violence in the West Bank, and launches strikes on Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, American conservatives are taking special note of one form of Israeli belligerence: attacks on Christians in the Holy Land.

An Israeli tank last week shelled the only Catholic church in Gaza, killing three and gravely wounding several. Over in the West Bank, settlers in recent weeks have intensified their attacks on Christian communities, including in the town of Taybeh, where they set cars aflame and erected a sign that read “there is no future for you here,” among other indignities.

Many American Christians, including high-profile MAGA influencers, have had enough—jeopardizing one of Israel’s most vital bases of Western support.

The former congressman Matt Gaetz, host of a popular show on One America News, has used the platform to put Israel on blast. In one segment this week, Gaetz highlighted the harassment of Christians by Israelis, including the desecration of holy sites. The Times of Israel last week noted other criticisms of Israel that Gaetz has leveled, depicting them as “a sign of a change in right-wing public opinion in the US surrounding Israel’s actions against Palestinians.”

The Times was right to see Gaetz’s escalating rhetoric as part of a broader shift. The podcaster Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire said last week that his support for the Jewish state was waning, and he questioned Israel’s claim that the recent church attack in Gaza was an accident. “I’ve been broadly supportive of the state of Israel, not really as an ideological matter, but as a matter of prudence, and you’re losing me, you’re losing me,” said Knowles, a devout Catholic.

Even the American ambassador to Israel and former Baptist minister Mike Huckabee—“as strong a supporter of the state of Israel as there is,” Knowles observed—has lambasted Israeli mistreatment of Christians.

After the settler rampage in Taybeh, Huckabee toured the Christian Palestinian town and spoke with community leaders, who told him of an arson attack two weeks ago that imperiled a historic church in the area. The ambassador seemed to take their message to heart. “Desecrating a church, mosque or synagogue is a crime against humanity & God,” Huckabee wrote on X Saturday.

In another post days earlier, Huckabee reacted to brutal murders outside the West Bank village Sinjil, where settlers beat to death two Palestinians, including an American citizen who had been visiting family and friends in the occupied territory. “There must be accountability for this criminal and terrorist act,” Huckabee wrote.

The ambassador has directed his ire not only against Israeli settlers but also Israeli officials. In a letter to the interior minister, Huckabee warned, citing Israel’s systematic denial of visas for evangelical missions, that he could declare the Jewish state no longer welcomes Christians. He even threatened to order reciprocal measures targeting Israelis travelling to America.

Israel can’t afford to lose the ambassador. Following Huckabee’s pushback, the visa dispute was swiftly resolved, meaning American Christians can resume their Holy Land tours.

And soon, many MAGA influencers will get the chance to see the land where Jesus walked. “The Israeli Foreign Ministry will fund a tour of Israel for U.S. social media influencers affiliated with the Make America Great Again and America First brands of conservatism,” reported Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, on Sunday.

It’s no surprise that the Israeli government sees a growing need to launch a new influence campaign. Pro-Israel voices, including Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, have expressed alarm about the precipitous decline in support for Israel around the world, including in America. The purpose of the new initiative, Haaretz noted, will be to encourage MAGA influencers “to disseminate messaging that aligns with the Israeli government’s policy.”

The PR strategy isn’t new. Israel has long courted America’s Christian conservatives, hosting tours of cherished Biblical sites. Since at least the premiership of Menachem Begin in the 1970s, the Israeli government has viewed American evangelicals as a strategic asset and sought to keep them onside. America’s pro-Israel lobbying groups have followed suit, cultivating relationships with evangelical leaders.

Historically, Israeli outreach has paid off, helping evangelicals and American conservatives broadly become perhaps the most vocal non-Jewish supporters of Israel in the Western world. But Israel’s “Hasbara”—public diplomacy intended to polish its image abroad—may be losing force.

Scholars at Northeastern University last year found a stark generational gap in Americans’ support for the Jewish state. A Pew Research survey published this April corroborated that research, finding that a slim majority of American adults express an unfavorable opinion of Israel, with Americans under 50 markedly less supportive of the country than Baby Boomers. Both studies noted that the generational divide showed up in both parties.

During the first Trump administration, the Washington Post was already reporting that younger Republicans, including evangelicals, were more wary of Israel than their older counterparts.

You don’t need to pore over polling crosstabs to detect the change in opinion. Earlier this month, the podcaster and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson delivered a rousing speech to an audience of young, largely Christian conservatives. When Carlson declared that Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender and disgraced financier, had been an Israeli intelligence asset, the crowd applauded.

Some Protestant Gen-Xers and Millennials have continued defending Israel, but they are meeting increasingly fierce pushback. A Twitterstorm erupted over the weekend after Joel Berry, managing editor of the Babylon Bee and a pro-Israel Protestant, seemed to rationalize the church attack in Gaza. “This won’t be easy for people to hear, but there are only about 200 professed Catholics still living in Gaza and they all support Hamas,” Berry wrote. Other Christians pounced, and the post was promptly “ratioed,” receiving more comments than likes.

While the ensuing clash seemed to pit Catholics against Protestants, not all of Berry’s critics were members of the Roman church. “Joel’s takes on this have been horrific but they are his own ideology, please do not attribute his beliefs to evangelicals,” wrote Auron MacIntyre of the Blaze. “As an evangelical I don’t think Israel gets a blank check to destroy Catholic churches or kill their parishioners.”

Of course, social media doesn’t always reflect public opinion, and right-wingers on X tend to be more Israel-critical than conservatives in the suburbs. But harsh criticisms of Israel by both Huckabee and another Mideast envoy, America’s Ambassador to Syria Thomas Barrack, show that the recent backlash hasn’t been the exclusive purview of online influencers.

White House officials who view the region from afar have also lost patience. “Bibi acted like a madman. He bombs everything all the time,” one official told Axios, using Netanyahu’s nickname. According to a second White House official, President Donald Trump called Netanyahu after the shelling of Gaza’s only Catholic church to demand an explanation.

As cracks emerge on the American right over Israeli militarism and mistreatment of Christians, the Jewish state faces a harrowing situation, one that is largely of Netanyahu’s making.

Ever since the Barack Obama years, Netanyahu has reacted to America’s intensifying polarization by siding with the red team—a tactic that many Israelis have criticized for alienating Democrats. Throughout the Gaza war, which Netanyahu has treated as a chance to hold onto power, the GOP has remained a vital partner of the Jewish state amid a rapid decline in its popularity worldwide. But even here, the trend lines don’t look good for Israel.

Over the next few years and decades, as the old Republican guard gives way to younger MAGA leaders, America’s “greatest ally” may find itself friendless on the world stage. If that day comes, Israelis will look back on Netanyahu not as “Mr. Security,” as he now is known, but as the prime minister who led Israel into a perilous geopolitical predicament.

ISRAEL’S LIES ARE BEGINNING TO CHOKE ISRAEL

This Genocide Is One Nonstop Insult To Your Intelligence. The Lies Israel And Its Supporters Have To Pretend To Believe Are Getting So Ridiculous That Supporting Israel Is Now An Act Of Public Humiliation.

Netanyahu has confirmed reports that Israel plans an extreme escalation in Gaza which will entail the total military occupation of the entire enclave and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, which the Israeli spin machine has termed “voluntary migration”.

To be clear, anyone who says the expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza would be “voluntary” is lying. Starving a population and deliberately making their land uninhabitable is exactly the same as forcing them out at gunpoint. Saying “leave or you’ll starve” is not meaningfully different from saying “leave or I’ll shoot you in the head”. Israel’s planned mass expulsion will be as forced and involuntary as any in recorded history.

President Trump has fully signed off on this move, washing his hands of the mass atrocity he is cosigning by telling the press that it’s going to be “pretty much up to Israel.”

Trump is lying. It’s up to him. That’s why more than 600 former senior Israeli security officials from Mossad and Shin Bet just sent Trump a letter urging him to compel Netanyahu to make peace in Gaza. They understand that the American president has always had the power to end the Gaza holocaust; numerous Israeli insiders have said that this mass atrocity would not be possible without American assistance.

Trump could end all this at any time, and chooses not to. This makes him one of the most evil people in the world.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu now says the shocking images of Gaza’s completely flattened landscape aren’t the result of months of Israeli airstrikes, artillery, and systematic bulldozer operations—but because “Hamas booby traps every single building.”

This whole genocide is powered by lies. Netanyahu just told Fox News that the horrifying aerial footage of the destruction in Gaza that we’ve been seeing is because every single building in Gaza was booby trapped with explosives by Hamas.

“The reason you see the flattened buildings is because Hamas booby traps every single building,” Netanyahu said. “So when we come in, we first have the population moved even though Hamas tries to keep them in the combat zones. But after they move, and we start to move into the neighborhoods that are now populated only by terrorists, they ignite these booby traps. So what we do is we put in an APC, an armored personnel carrier, with a lot of explosives. Detonate it. It sets off all the booby traps and the buildings begin to collapse as a result of that. They’re empty buildings, they’re not populated buildings.”

Absolutely nobody believes this is true. Not one single person alive on this earth sincerely believes that Gaza now looks like a gravel parking lot because Hamas placed explosives inside every single building. Netanyahu doesn’t believe it. Israel’s most venomous supporters don’t believe it. It’s just part of the nonstop fountain of lies they are spewing to avoid acknowledging what we all know we’re looking at. They’ve told so many lies by now that they’ve got to keep lying and lying just to stay afloat, like a man desperately treading water to avoid drowning.

This genocide is one nonstop insult to our intelligence. It’s actually degrading at this point. The lies Israel and its supporters have to pretend to believe are getting so ridiculous that supporting Israel is now an act of public humiliation and self-debasement.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned that Tel Aviv is losing American support. He said that Israel was increasingly viewed as a “leper state” and “losing the Republican party.”

Former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett has a long rant on his social media accounts complaining that Israel’s “status in the United States is collapsing”, including among Republicans, with public sentiment turning against them because of what is happening in Gaza.

As you might expect, Bennett does not frame this as a sign that Israel should stop committing genocide in Gaza, but rather complains of a crisis of “antisemitism” in the United States, and accuses Netanyahu of failing to adequately propagandize Americans.

“Jews in the United States are subject to a torrential wave of anti-Semitism, like him I don’t remember in my life,” Bennett moans, adding, “Antisemites increase to compare the ‘hunger’ in Gaza to the Holocaust, and thus reduce the memory of the Holocaust. They act that the hunger accusation will haunt israel its citizens, our soldiers, for generations.”

“If Netanyahu’s propaganda men worked against the enemies of Israel *outside* a tenth of the talent, speed and dedication with which they operate the propaganda machine against their political rivals *inside* israel our situation would be amazing,” Bennet writes, saying he wants to “re-establish a rapid and synchronized explanation headquarters”.

“Explanation” is the literal translation of the Hebrew word “hasbara”, i.e. pro-Israel propaganda.

Israel is dropping the term “hasbara” to describe its propaganda efforts and replacing it with “toda’a” (consciousness.)

Meanwhile the term “hasbara” itself is reportedly being abandoned by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, as westerners have come to associate the term with genocide propaganda.

The Times of Israel reports:

“Long referred to as hasbara, a term used to denote both public relations and propaganda that has been freighted with negative baggage in recent years, the ministry now brands its approach as toda’a — which translates to ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’ — an apparent shift toward broader, more proactive messaging.”

So they’re not abandoning the genocide, and they’re not abandoning the genocide propaganda, they’re just abandoning the word for the genocide propaganda because people have come to associate that word with propaganda in support of genocide.

The entire Zionist project is built on a foundation of lies. And their lies are starting to catch up with them. They’re now at a point where the lies are beginning to damage the public image they’re intended to protect.

When a liar is recognized as a liar, his lies will forevermore work only as an antidote to his past lies, and as a light to further expose his intent. From that point on any lie he tells just shows people how ugly his character and intentions really are.

There is no other weapon that works that way. No other weapon which when it’s seen immediately stops working, actively disarms the attacker, starts fixing what he broke, and starts attacking him.

The truth will win in the end – we all should hope.

THE WRONG QUESTION IS: “WHAT WAS ISRAEL SUPPOSED TO DO AFTER OCTOBER 7?”

A Much More Useful And Interesting Is “What Were Palestinians Supposed To Do In Response To All Of Israel’s Abuses Prior To October 7^th?”

As Israel and its supporters continue to lose control of the narrative around the world with more and more people awakening to the reality that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, There is the resurrection of a talking point that western Israel apologists have been trying to make work off and on since this mass atrocity began.

“What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7^th?” they ask confidently, taking it as a given that there is no possible answer to this brilliant checkmate question besides “Rain vast quantities of military explosives on a giant concentration camp full of children and deliberately starve a civilian population using siege warfare.”

But the real problem is that they are asking the wrong question.

A much more useful and interesting question than “What was Israel supposed to do in response to October 7^th?” is “What were Palestinians supposed to do in response to all of Israel’s abuses prior to October 7^th?”

Nobody’s ever been willing to give a serious response to this question which doesn’t entail mountains of lies and/or the dehumanizing expectation that Palestinians should accept conditions that none of us would willingly accept ourselves.

That’s why you never see us criticizing Hamas. If someone could tell us what specifically Palestinians should have done in response to Israel’s tyranny that they haven’t already tried in order to obtain real material justice, we would happily say Hamas should have taken that option instead of resorting to violent force. But if that option truly existed, Hamas never would have been created in the first place. That’s why nobody’s been able to tell us what such an option would have looked like without lying.

What was Israel supposed to do after October 7^th? Same thing they should have done before October 7^th: dismantle the apartheid state, give everyone equal rights, pay massive reparations, and right all the wrongs of the past. October 7^th was a response to the tyranny and abuse of Israel; the correct thing to do when things finally came to a head with the Hamas attack would have been to remove all the tyranny and abuse which gave rise to it.

That’s what Israel should have done. Of course Israel was never going to do this, for the same reason they spent decade after decade murdering, displacing and oppressing Palestinians since Israel was created. Israel would never allow justice and equality after October 7^th for the same reason Israel would never allow justice and equality before October 7^th: because Israel has always been a settler-colonialist project that can only be sustained by nonstop violence and tyranny and theft and abuse and lies and breathtaking immorality.

That is the reason October 7^th happened, and it’s the problem all decent people in the world are trying to address right now.

Those who suggest that everything Israel is doing in Gaza can be explained by October 7^th have got it exactly backwards: everything we’re seeing in Gaza explains why October 7^th happened in the first place.

The sadism and psychopathy we’re witnessing in Gaza didn’t magically appear 22 months ago; everyone in Gaza has been experiencing Israel’s abusiveness in various manifestations throughout their entire lives.

Israel has always been this way. October 7^th just gave it the excuse to completely unleash its genocidal impulses.

TELL FUTURE GENERATIONS: THEY KNEW. THEY ALL KNEW WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN GAZA.

Don’t Let Them Get Away With Saying They Didn’t Know. They Knew The Entire Time. Brand Them Permanently With This Shame, And Make Them Carry It For The Rest Of Their Lives.

A note to future generations for historical record:

Every pundit, politician and reporter of our time who claims they didn’t know what was happening in Gaza is lying.

They knew what was happening. They knew Israel was telling lies. They knew about everything.

They had access to the same information as all the rest of us. We watched them make excuses and ignore indisputable facts every step of the way. There was absolutely no confusion about what they were looking at. It was all right out in the open.

Don’t let them get away with saying they didn’t know. They knew. They knew the entire time. Brand them permanently with this shame, and force them to carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

You should hate all genocide supporters equally, regardless of their religion. Talking about your religion is like telling us about your dreams: it’s completely uninteresting. If you support an active genocide you’re a bad person who deserves to be shunned and reviled, regardless of what your religion happens to be.

It’s so wild how Jewish people will just stride confidently into public discourse about Gaza while strongly emphasizing their Jewishness, as though their support for genocide is somehow special and different from any other idiot’s support for genocide. Wanting to starve civilians and mass murder children makes you a piece of crap, whether you are Jewish, Mormon, Buddhist, or atheist.

Nobody cares what religious belief systems you happen to hold in your head while you advocate massacring civilians, they care about the fact that you advocate massacring civilians. Being Jewish doesn’t give you some kind of magical immunity from being held to basic moral standards and being judged by society for supporting a mass atrocity. It’s got nothing to do with anything.

After a whistleblower on the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation named Tony Aguilar shared the heartbreaking story about a boy named Amir who became one of the many Palestinians massacred by Israeli forces while trying to obtain food at an aid site, his family reported that he had been missing since that day and they hadn’t known what had happened to him. They still don’t know where his body is.

The fact that people just “go missing” in Gaza after being killed indicates Israel often buries the bodies of victims to cover up their deaths — something they’ve been caught doing before. This is one of many reasons why we can be sure that the actual death toll is much higher than the official record.

You shouldn’t be able to believe Israel supporters spent days yelling “Israel isn’t starving children, it’s starving SICK children!” and thought that was an awesome argument.

Friendly periodic reminder that the “Israel bombs hospitals because the hospitals are Hamas bases” narrative was conclusively debunked when IDF soldiers were repeatedly documented entering the hospitals they attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment, one by one. Hamas isn’t the target, healthcare is the target. That has been irrefutably established.

Opposing the Gaza genocide has meant being proven right about everything from the very beginning every step of the way, hating being proven right, and then having the liberals who kept yelling at you for your rightness slowly begin to acknowledge that you were right, while still finding excuses to hate you for being right anyway.

A new poll by the Israel Democracy Institute has found that only 6.7 percent of Jewish Israelis say they are “very troubled” by reports of starvation and suffering in Gaza, with 67 percent saying they are either “not at all troubled” or “not so troubled” by the news. That means those who are pretty much fine with deliberately starving children outnumber those who hold a normal attitude on the matter ten to one.

Poll after poll after poll shows that Jewish Israelis are horrible people who are quantifiably much more cruel and immoral than pretty much any other population. At a certain point you have to stop thinking the polls might be mistaken and see that the only real mistake is Israel.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian support for the war with Russia has plunged even further, with a new Gallup poll finding that just 24 percent of Ukrainians now support continuing the fight until victory. A 69 percent supermajority now say they want peace negotiations as soon as possible.

A majority of Ukrainians have wanted this war to end for a while now. At this point the only ones who want more war are westerners, plus some of the Ukrainians who live far away from the fighting.

We’re being told the holocaust in Gaza can’t be ended, and we’re being told the war nobody wants in Ukraine must continue. We are ruled by monsters.

IT IS DELUSIONAL TO PURSUE REGIME CHANGE IN CHINA AND RUSSIA

Members Of America’s Foreign Policy Elite Are Extremely Fond Of “Regime Change” As The Preferred Method For Dealing With Adversarial Governments. Hawkish Allies In Europe Share That Mentality.

Some activists now want to see if the strategy can work to oust Russian president Vladimir Putin and end the war between Russia and Ukraine with a definitive victory for NATO’s Ukrainian proxy. A few hawks even advocate pursuing regime change in China.

In both cases, the strategy likely would prove catastrophic.

The love affair with regime change, whether through direct force or indirect destabilizing actions, has had a firm hold on the thinking of Western interventionists for a long time. As far back as 1953, the CIA worked with the British government to remove Iran’s democratically elected but sometimes uncooperative prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, and restore the autocratic Shah to power. Washington’s targets throughout the international system over the decades number well into the double digits. Recent adversaries removed through direct or indirect American regime action include Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, and (just last year) Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

As the Iran episode confirmed, dictators are not the only rulers put on Washington’s regime change hit list. Barack Obama’s administration aided—and perhaps even organized—the efforts of anti-government demonstrators to unseat Ukraine’s elected pro-Russia president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

American leaders regarded such regime change missions as great successes and have failed to learn two important lessons in the process. One is that apparent short-term successes frequently turn into longer-term fiascos. Getting rid of Gaddafi, for example, turned Libya into a cauldron of chaos where there were even credible reports of open-air slave markets for black African refugees. The overthrow of Mosaddegh ultimately helped pave the way to power for the current repressive Islamist regime and fostered an abiding hatred of the United States among many Iranians. Washington’s undermining of Yanukovych highlighted growing American contempt for Moscow’s view that Ukraine was crucial to Russia’s security. Repeated warnings from Putin and his associates that NATO’s continuing expansion toward Russia’s border, especially attempts to make Ukraine a NATO member or asset, would cross a bright red line went unheeded. The Kremlin’s subsequent military actions against Ukraine in turn led to the onset of a dangerous proxy war between NATO and Russia.

The other lesson that too many Western hawks have failed to learn is that even when regime change may prove feasible against relatively small, weak opponents, it will not work against larger, more powerful countries. Moreover, it is extraordinarily dangerous even to try such a coercive move. The risks include a vastly destructive war that could equal or even exceed the horrors of the two world wars. Nevertheless, reckless hawks indulge in regime-change fantasies with respect to both the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia.

Although PRC officials remain suspicious of Washington’s long-term intentions, hardliners in the West focus more on strengthening Washington’s informal commitment to defend Taiwan than they think about fomenting regime change in the PRC itself. Even some of Beijing’s most aggressive opponents in America and its security partners in East Asia have concluded that seeking the overthrow of China’s communist government (however odious the regime might be) is a bridge too far.

It is imperative that American leaders avoid the temptation to pursue the objective of regime change in either China or Russia. Both powers are much more serious and capable geostrategic players than any of Washington’s previous targets. It is profoundly dangerous and unwise to equate such adversaries with the likes of Iran, Guatemala, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, or Syria. Those countries were all second-tier or even third-tier military powers. Their ability to inflict damage on the American military was quite limited, although regime change in even those small, weak countries gave the American regime far more trouble than anticipated.

Russia and the PRC are full-fledged great powers capable of mounting very damaging diplomatic, economic, and even military countermoves against the United States. Most importantly both countries possess nuclear arsenals that could inflict enormous damage on the American homeland. The American regime has been able to overthrow adversarial regimes running much weaker countries, but it would be extremely dangerous, and quite possibly suicidal, to attempt the same strategy with respect to China or Russia. The American political and policy elites must abandon such irresponsible regime change fantasies.